10 Best Movie Screenplays Since 2010
4. Room
Emma Donoghue Drama
Based on the novel by Emma Donoghue (whom adapted the screenplay herself), Room was a terrific script and a terrific film. It charts the story of a mother-son relationship during and after their imprisonment in a dingy basement for seven years. For whilst the pair do indeed escape their incarceration, what is it they escape into, the film bravely asks?
For it will be the son, who has known nothing except this small room for all his life who will possess the true resilience for the outside world even if it was Ma who needed most to escape into it. How cruel for Ma, then, Ma who had engineered a kind of fairytale existence for her son in the basement, rising above the shame and anger of her imprisonment to raise her child as best she could, who will be rewarded with an emptiness in the outside world.
Room was about a relationship, then, not a captivity, even if the scene in which the young boy is charged with evading his captor, having never before experienced the outside world and with only one shot at getting this right, will surely go down in movie lore forever. For Donaghue manages to serve up a momentous parable about parenthood wrapped around a chilling horror story with-such real-life overtures of the skeletons in suburban closets, or basements in this case.
The first half of the film's story engine is driven by a single goal; escape. Yet here is why the script succeeds, because, once they do, now what? How will they recover? Will they put the kettle on? Go for a walk? Now what?